Scopus Content update: 50,000 books indexed

Since our last content update in June, we’ve been busy moving the Scopus Books Expansion project along. To date, you can see more than 50,000 books in Scopus!

In case you missed the announcement, in mid-2013 Scopus launched the Books Expansion Project. Books from more than 30 major publishers such as Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, Elsevier, Brill, Walter de Gruyter, Princeton University Press, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Taylor & Francis, Palgrave Macmillan and Project Muse have been selected and are being processed for inclusion in Scopus. Although books from all subject fields are considered for the project, the focus is on Social Sciences and Arts & Humanities -- at least 25% of the books currently in Scopus are in these subject fields.

The reason is this: Pocock recovered a tradition of political thinking about time and politics in which the political body was analogous to the human body, and doomed in consequence to decline and die. Delaying such a fate was the aspiration of generation after generation of political authors. Machiavelli's response to the problem of the crisis that would ultimately face every republic entailed a policy of rejecting commerce and luxury, of imbuing the citizenry with manliness in order to win wars, and above all plot to turn a small state into a large empire. Machiavelli's model was the Romans, and he thought it should be everyone’s.

Pocock's genius was to trace the echoes of such arguments, formulated in the turbulence of the dying republic of Florence, to seventeenth-century and eighteen-century Britain and on to the generation of the Founding Fathers in North America. The republican critique of commerce and empire inspired Thomas Jefferson among others. The existence of the tradition confirmed the ancient and illiberal origins of American liberty. Pocock inspired intellectual historians to follow his method of the deep contextualisation of ideas. He also caused an intellectual ferment by challenging the self-satisfied myths of the nature and origins of the American Republic.”

For an up-to-date list of the books currently indexed in Scopus, see the public books list on the Scopus info site.